Jrene Rahm | Université de Montréal (original) (raw)
Papers by Jrene Rahm
SensePublishers eBooks, 2012
Studies of science learning and identity development in out-of-school settings (OST) grounded in ... more Studies of science learning and identity development in out-of-school settings (OST) grounded in sociocultural historical theory attest to its important contribution to the development of science literacy in children and adolescents. Learning science takes many forms in quality OST settings and is typically initiated and directed by the youth themselves. Through interaction with authentic, rich environments, such as gardens or science laboratories, learning in OST settings is about connecting scientific knowledge with scientific practice. OST settings also offer opportunities to engage in scientific reasoning by observing, manipulating and questioning the surroundings. Engagement in science in OST settings also support new ways of understanding and relating to science. Youth may come to see themselves as knowledgeable of science through their engagement with it and through the opportunities that emerge that make agency possible (i.e., putting science to use). Youth may, for the first time, come to see themselves as capable of doing science and, therefore, as potential insiders of science. It is this kind of identity work, which is closely tied to learning, that I explore in this chapter, as I look at learning and becoming in OST settings (see also National Research Council, 2009; Rahm, 2010).
Frontiers in Education, Feb 21, 2023
This perspective article draws on conversations with a program coordinator in a community organiz... more This perspective article draws on conversations with a program coordinator in a community organization that guided the development of an after school Convoclub for girls, which focused on understanding the role of science in their lives. We examine our conversations with the program coordinator to understand how a ective placemaking, brought about by engagement in a digital storytelling project, created a new space for girls' engagement in science. We describe these conversations as part of our "research story"-a term intended to highlight the importance of storying in postqualitative methods. We draw on data from a qualitative case study of the co-designed science activities in Convoclub with a special focus on conversations with its program director and our joint work in the design of the club activities over time (i.e., dialogue circles with the six youth participants, a digital storytelling project, and a video documentary about science). Presented in three vignettes, we address the evolution of the club activities and its implications for designing spaces for learning and becoming informal science learning environments supportive of empowering identities in science understood through framing from a posthumanist perspective. Throughout, we consider the implications of refiguring research stories of identity by attending to the mundane yet also emergent stories of assemblages-a ectively charged associations of people, places, and things. We consider what this orientation brings not only to the telling of identity stories but also to the co-design of learning spaces and considerations about whose voices and stories are told and heard in science spaces.
Knowing the land, the environment and stories tied to it are ways of life for Inuit, deeply groun... more Knowing the land, the environment and stories tied to it are ways of life for Inuit, deeply grounded in and emergent from a holistic vision of the world. Naturally, stewardship of the land, water and ice are integral to ways of knowing and being Inuit. Yet, that expert knowledge is rarely valued as science and often treated as complementary to Western science. It has led to calls for new research practices and policies to overcome capacity-building as a one-way street. In this paper, we offer three examples of truly collaborative work driven by local needs identified and assumed by Inuit and their community. We begin an environmental monitoring project pursued by youth and young adults that led to the monitoring of the health of local food sources and “creation” of food through a local greenhouse project in Arviat. We then document the expanded leadership to study water quality project in Pond Inlet, Nunavut. The third case illustrates a place-based science curriculum that has evolved from stewardship projects by the Arctic Eider Society in Sanikiluaq, Nunavut. The three cases offer important educational implications for STEM Education in Inuit Nunangat with a commitment to Inuit science and decolonisation.
![Research paper thumbnail of Des clubs de sciences parascolaires : un outil pour développer des liens chez des jeunes de diverses communautés ethniques et pour appuyer un apprentissage transformationnel chez les élèves et les futurs enseignants [synthèse en français]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/111379338/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Alterstice, 2016
ARTICLE THÉMATIQUE Des clubs de sciences parascolaires : un outil pour développer des liens chez ... more ARTICLE THÉMATIQUE Des clubs de sciences parascolaires : un outil pour développer des liens chez des jeunes de diverses communautés ethniques et pour appuyer un apprentissage transformationnel chez les élèves et les futurs enseignants [synthèse en français*]
Journal of Research in Science Teaching, Jun 15, 2023
This article explores the meaning of community‐driven and owned science in the context of an Inui... more This article explores the meaning of community‐driven and owned science in the context of an Inuit‐led land‐based program, the Young Hunters Program. It is the foundational program of the Arviat Aqqiumavvik Society, situated in Nunavut, Canada, a community‐led group dedicated to researching challenges to community wellness and designing and delivering programs to help address those challenges. We show how the program emerged locally and blends Indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) with tools of western science in respectful ways given its core sits within and emerges from what Inuit have always known to be true. We offer a description of six dimensions inherent in Inuit cultural practices and beliefs and foundational to the program activities and show how they open up various learning trajectories and possibilities for the involved young people to engage in community science. We then discuss in what ways the revitalization of IKS and practices led to community science projects that were locally meaningful and empowering with important implications for scientific work that mattered in light of locally experienced and devastating climate change threats. The study speaks to the importance of rebuilding relations and decolonizing knowledge systems and science practices, two key tools to Inuit self‐determination and social transformations, and essential to achieving more social justice and equity in and beyond community science.
Alterstice, Dec 5, 2016
Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y ... more Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d'utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne.
Afterschool Matters, 2005
Tamara is about to plant Swiss chard in a small pot filled with potting soil. She calls out, "I n... more Tamara is about to plant Swiss chard in a small pot filled with potting soil. She calls out, "I need a ruler." Buddy, who is busily potting his own seeds, asks, "Why do you need a ruler?" Tamara responds, "Because it said half-thirteen millimeter. That's a lot deep!" Tarr, who just finished potting his seeds, has some advice: "Just stick your finger in there and see!" Tamara wondered, "My finger? The first one? Not including my finger nail?" 1 (field notes, June 1996) This vignette and others were gleaned from an evaluation project, "Ways of Talking and Thinking about Science in a Garden" (Rahm, 1998; Rahm, 2002), a study of the 4-H Young Entrepreneur Garden Program (4-H YEGP) in Denver, Colorado. As the story shows, planting seeds-an essential activity and component of 4-H YEGP-was new to most of the youth participants. Here, Tamara is learning from one of her peers how to plant without using exact measurements. While Tamara appears puzzled by such an inexact way of working, Tarr has already mastered this common gardening practice. 4-H YEGP intentionally implements a policy that Kenneth Grimes, one of the authors of this article and director of Denver 4-H Programs, calls "sneaking up on education." On the surface, the program seems merely to be a summer job for young adolescents who are too old for daycare but too young for full-time employment. Youth who are on summer vacation have often had their fill of traditional classroom structures and modes of instruction.
Journal of Research in Science Teaching, Sep 23, 2015
Our longitudinal study unpacks how an informal summer science and mathematics enrichment program ... more Our longitudinal study unpacks how an informal summer science and mathematics enrichment program influenced the educational pathways of four first-generation college-bound students. Through the lens of identity-in-practice and navigations, we explore their figured worlds of science, positioning and authoring of self in science as they applied to the program, as they participated in the program and later, in light of their college pathways. We explore the range of social and material supports the program made available to the four youth. We also show how they became consequential and for some facilitated navigations into college and STEM degrees while others experienced uncoordinated practices over time that pushed them out of science. Our study of local struggles at three pivotal moments in time attests to the agentive side of youth as they navigate in and out of science and engage in improvisational acts to get educated despite being tangled up in a matrix of oppression. At the same time, our study calls for systemic approaches that bring formal and informal science venues together in a more seamless manner. We call for a strength-based model that recognizes and leverages youths' figured worlds, positionings, and authored selves in science across context and over time in ways that they become consequential, empowering, and supportive of STEM pathways. We also call for more longitudinal studies committed to a theoretical grounding in identity-in-practice and navigations. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 53: 768–801, 2016
Mind, Culture, and Activity, Mar 15, 2023
Cognition and Instruction, Jun 24, 2019
What is behind the current narrative "more STEM in schools and societies" that this special issue... more What is behind the current narrative "more STEM in schools and societies" that this special issue aims to address? If, indeed, we are committed to more STEM in schools and societies, what does this look like in practice? Where do we currently stand in terms of endorsing inclusive and comprehensive STEM practices that engage in and are committed to questions about STEM learning for whom and toward what ends? With these questions in mind, I read the articles, but then also explored a recent report by the Committee of STEM Education of the National Science and Technology Council, mandated by the United States Government (2018), and published in December 2018, entitled "Charting a Course for Success: America's Strategy for STEM Education." I situate my commentary in this report, which endorses a vision of STEM that hints at a change not just in vocabulary but also in its inherent definition that transcends disciplinary and epistemological boundaries in ways the articles in this special issue also address. The report also points to pathways of success through partnerships that not only make STEM more widely accessible and therefore inclusive, but also more deeply seated in current challenges, realities, and issues we face as a nation through a valuing of heterogeneity or multiples. The report suggests that to respond effectively, we have to bring not only expertise in STEM to the table, but also a positioning of selves as critical agents of change who are open-minded and have the skills to engage with others and other disciplines to then address the challenges of our times together. The report reads: Over the past 25 years, STEM education has been evolving from a convenient clustering of four overlapping disciplines toward a more cohesive knowledge base and skill set critical for the economy of the 21st century. The best STEM education provides an interdisciplinary approach to learning, where rigorous academic concepts are coupled with real-world applications and students use STEM in contexts that make connections between school, community, work, and the wider world. Leaders in STEM education continue to broaden and deepen its scope and further transcend the fields of study beyond just a combination of the four disciplines to include the arts and humanities. Modern STEM education imparts not only skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, higher order thinking, design, and inference, but also behavioral competencies such as perseverance, adaptability, cooperation, organization, and responsibility. (p. 1) CONTACT Jr ene Rahm
Les Presses de l'Université de Montréal eBooks, Oct 2, 2018
Routledge eBooks, Jun 14, 2022
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education, Nov 29, 2021
Learning and becoming are understood as emergent from participation in practices at the intersect... more Learning and becoming are understood as emergent from participation in practices at the intersection of formal and informal science education. What learners value, engage in, and transform is understood as entangled with who they have been, think they are, and yet aim to become, calling for an intersectional lens to any analysis of learning and identity in science. Who one is and can become in science, given recognition by others as a science person, is political and a product of intersecting patterns of racism and sexism, to name two key dimensions, which are not additive but instead form a symbiotic relationship. Intersectionality foregrounds the structural, political, and representational of an oppressive system at work and is a lens essential to an equity- and social justice–driven conceptualization of science education at the intersection of formal and informal educational venues. Critical transdisciplinarity facilitates the unpacking of what science is and what kind of science a science person engages in, and it can move studies beyond paralyzing ideologies and meritocracies that undermine full participation in science by youth of color, for instance. Engagement with intersectionality, critical transdisciplinarity, and the political can make rightful presence a shared goal to work toward among science educators and researchers, a much-needed commitment in the informal science education field. Community-based educational spaces (CBES) challenge deficit discourses of youth and, instead, aim to build on youths’ funds of knowledge and identities through empowering practices. Identity work is approached through a grounding in practice theory, which calls for a focus on the figuring of worlds, lives, and identities. Becoming somebody in science is presented as a creative act by youth, who challenge what science is and who can become somebody in science. Actions by youth can make evident desirable identities that result in the “thickening” of their affinities with science, a process also charged by emotions. That is, intersectionality can be experienced as emotionally taxing, while agency and transformation by youth may result in positive emotions. A mobile view of learning and identity in science, captured by the notion of wayfinding, calls to attention hybridity, intersectionality, and critical transdisciplinarity. That grounding can move the study of learning and becoming in science beyond a binary vision of formal and informal science education while also making it political. A deeper commitment and engagement with social justice work in studies of learning and identity in CBES, a process well captured by the notion of rightful presence, could become a common goal to work toward in the vast field of science education, both formal and informal.
Environmental Education Research, May 4, 2018
How can we 'desettle' the colonial discourse and worldview of botanical gardens and its practices... more How can we 'desettle' the colonial discourse and worldview of botanical gardens and its practices in teaching about plants? How can we move towards engaging deeply with who we are and think we are in relation to place, land, and the world, grounded in an intricate sense of harmony? How can we move our work in botanic gardens beyond regarding land, plants, and nature as commodities for causal consumption, or as places to rapidly observe but typically not touch? I explore these three questions in this paper through a weaving together of some of the literature on education and informal learning in botanical gardens and narratives from my research with urban youth of color in the Botanical Garden of Montreal. In doing so, I make evident youths' navigations of botanical gardens and their bids for recognition as other than detached from nature. Together, these narratives help to rethink taken for granted practices of education about plants in gardens grounded in Western views of science and lack of a more serious engagement with holistic perspectives of humans in and with nature.
Contributions from science education research, 2023
SensePublishers eBooks, 2012
Studies of science learning and identity development in out-of-school settings (OST) grounded in ... more Studies of science learning and identity development in out-of-school settings (OST) grounded in sociocultural historical theory attest to its important contribution to the development of science literacy in children and adolescents. Learning science takes many forms in quality OST settings and is typically initiated and directed by the youth themselves. Through interaction with authentic, rich environments, such as gardens or science laboratories, learning in OST settings is about connecting scientific knowledge with scientific practice. OST settings also offer opportunities to engage in scientific reasoning by observing, manipulating and questioning the surroundings. Engagement in science in OST settings also support new ways of understanding and relating to science. Youth may come to see themselves as knowledgeable of science through their engagement with it and through the opportunities that emerge that make agency possible (i.e., putting science to use). Youth may, for the first time, come to see themselves as capable of doing science and, therefore, as potential insiders of science. It is this kind of identity work, which is closely tied to learning, that I explore in this chapter, as I look at learning and becoming in OST settings (see also National Research Council, 2009; Rahm, 2010).
Frontiers in Education, Feb 21, 2023
This perspective article draws on conversations with a program coordinator in a community organiz... more This perspective article draws on conversations with a program coordinator in a community organization that guided the development of an after school Convoclub for girls, which focused on understanding the role of science in their lives. We examine our conversations with the program coordinator to understand how a ective placemaking, brought about by engagement in a digital storytelling project, created a new space for girls' engagement in science. We describe these conversations as part of our "research story"-a term intended to highlight the importance of storying in postqualitative methods. We draw on data from a qualitative case study of the co-designed science activities in Convoclub with a special focus on conversations with its program director and our joint work in the design of the club activities over time (i.e., dialogue circles with the six youth participants, a digital storytelling project, and a video documentary about science). Presented in three vignettes, we address the evolution of the club activities and its implications for designing spaces for learning and becoming informal science learning environments supportive of empowering identities in science understood through framing from a posthumanist perspective. Throughout, we consider the implications of refiguring research stories of identity by attending to the mundane yet also emergent stories of assemblages-a ectively charged associations of people, places, and things. We consider what this orientation brings not only to the telling of identity stories but also to the co-design of learning spaces and considerations about whose voices and stories are told and heard in science spaces.
Knowing the land, the environment and stories tied to it are ways of life for Inuit, deeply groun... more Knowing the land, the environment and stories tied to it are ways of life for Inuit, deeply grounded in and emergent from a holistic vision of the world. Naturally, stewardship of the land, water and ice are integral to ways of knowing and being Inuit. Yet, that expert knowledge is rarely valued as science and often treated as complementary to Western science. It has led to calls for new research practices and policies to overcome capacity-building as a one-way street. In this paper, we offer three examples of truly collaborative work driven by local needs identified and assumed by Inuit and their community. We begin an environmental monitoring project pursued by youth and young adults that led to the monitoring of the health of local food sources and “creation” of food through a local greenhouse project in Arviat. We then document the expanded leadership to study water quality project in Pond Inlet, Nunavut. The third case illustrates a place-based science curriculum that has evolved from stewardship projects by the Arctic Eider Society in Sanikiluaq, Nunavut. The three cases offer important educational implications for STEM Education in Inuit Nunangat with a commitment to Inuit science and decolonisation.
Alterstice, 2016
ARTICLE THÉMATIQUE Des clubs de sciences parascolaires : un outil pour développer des liens chez ... more ARTICLE THÉMATIQUE Des clubs de sciences parascolaires : un outil pour développer des liens chez des jeunes de diverses communautés ethniques et pour appuyer un apprentissage transformationnel chez les élèves et les futurs enseignants [synthèse en français*]
Journal of Research in Science Teaching, Jun 15, 2023
This article explores the meaning of community‐driven and owned science in the context of an Inui... more This article explores the meaning of community‐driven and owned science in the context of an Inuit‐led land‐based program, the Young Hunters Program. It is the foundational program of the Arviat Aqqiumavvik Society, situated in Nunavut, Canada, a community‐led group dedicated to researching challenges to community wellness and designing and delivering programs to help address those challenges. We show how the program emerged locally and blends Indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) with tools of western science in respectful ways given its core sits within and emerges from what Inuit have always known to be true. We offer a description of six dimensions inherent in Inuit cultural practices and beliefs and foundational to the program activities and show how they open up various learning trajectories and possibilities for the involved young people to engage in community science. We then discuss in what ways the revitalization of IKS and practices led to community science projects that were locally meaningful and empowering with important implications for scientific work that mattered in light of locally experienced and devastating climate change threats. The study speaks to the importance of rebuilding relations and decolonizing knowledge systems and science practices, two key tools to Inuit self‐determination and social transformations, and essential to achieving more social justice and equity in and beyond community science.
Alterstice, Dec 5, 2016
Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y ... more Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d'utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne.
Afterschool Matters, 2005
Tamara is about to plant Swiss chard in a small pot filled with potting soil. She calls out, "I n... more Tamara is about to plant Swiss chard in a small pot filled with potting soil. She calls out, "I need a ruler." Buddy, who is busily potting his own seeds, asks, "Why do you need a ruler?" Tamara responds, "Because it said half-thirteen millimeter. That's a lot deep!" Tarr, who just finished potting his seeds, has some advice: "Just stick your finger in there and see!" Tamara wondered, "My finger? The first one? Not including my finger nail?" 1 (field notes, June 1996) This vignette and others were gleaned from an evaluation project, "Ways of Talking and Thinking about Science in a Garden" (Rahm, 1998; Rahm, 2002), a study of the 4-H Young Entrepreneur Garden Program (4-H YEGP) in Denver, Colorado. As the story shows, planting seeds-an essential activity and component of 4-H YEGP-was new to most of the youth participants. Here, Tamara is learning from one of her peers how to plant without using exact measurements. While Tamara appears puzzled by such an inexact way of working, Tarr has already mastered this common gardening practice. 4-H YEGP intentionally implements a policy that Kenneth Grimes, one of the authors of this article and director of Denver 4-H Programs, calls "sneaking up on education." On the surface, the program seems merely to be a summer job for young adolescents who are too old for daycare but too young for full-time employment. Youth who are on summer vacation have often had their fill of traditional classroom structures and modes of instruction.
Journal of Research in Science Teaching, Sep 23, 2015
Our longitudinal study unpacks how an informal summer science and mathematics enrichment program ... more Our longitudinal study unpacks how an informal summer science and mathematics enrichment program influenced the educational pathways of four first-generation college-bound students. Through the lens of identity-in-practice and navigations, we explore their figured worlds of science, positioning and authoring of self in science as they applied to the program, as they participated in the program and later, in light of their college pathways. We explore the range of social and material supports the program made available to the four youth. We also show how they became consequential and for some facilitated navigations into college and STEM degrees while others experienced uncoordinated practices over time that pushed them out of science. Our study of local struggles at three pivotal moments in time attests to the agentive side of youth as they navigate in and out of science and engage in improvisational acts to get educated despite being tangled up in a matrix of oppression. At the same time, our study calls for systemic approaches that bring formal and informal science venues together in a more seamless manner. We call for a strength-based model that recognizes and leverages youths' figured worlds, positionings, and authored selves in science across context and over time in ways that they become consequential, empowering, and supportive of STEM pathways. We also call for more longitudinal studies committed to a theoretical grounding in identity-in-practice and navigations. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 53: 768–801, 2016
Mind, Culture, and Activity, Mar 15, 2023
Cognition and Instruction, Jun 24, 2019
What is behind the current narrative "more STEM in schools and societies" that this special issue... more What is behind the current narrative "more STEM in schools and societies" that this special issue aims to address? If, indeed, we are committed to more STEM in schools and societies, what does this look like in practice? Where do we currently stand in terms of endorsing inclusive and comprehensive STEM practices that engage in and are committed to questions about STEM learning for whom and toward what ends? With these questions in mind, I read the articles, but then also explored a recent report by the Committee of STEM Education of the National Science and Technology Council, mandated by the United States Government (2018), and published in December 2018, entitled "Charting a Course for Success: America's Strategy for STEM Education." I situate my commentary in this report, which endorses a vision of STEM that hints at a change not just in vocabulary but also in its inherent definition that transcends disciplinary and epistemological boundaries in ways the articles in this special issue also address. The report also points to pathways of success through partnerships that not only make STEM more widely accessible and therefore inclusive, but also more deeply seated in current challenges, realities, and issues we face as a nation through a valuing of heterogeneity or multiples. The report suggests that to respond effectively, we have to bring not only expertise in STEM to the table, but also a positioning of selves as critical agents of change who are open-minded and have the skills to engage with others and other disciplines to then address the challenges of our times together. The report reads: Over the past 25 years, STEM education has been evolving from a convenient clustering of four overlapping disciplines toward a more cohesive knowledge base and skill set critical for the economy of the 21st century. The best STEM education provides an interdisciplinary approach to learning, where rigorous academic concepts are coupled with real-world applications and students use STEM in contexts that make connections between school, community, work, and the wider world. Leaders in STEM education continue to broaden and deepen its scope and further transcend the fields of study beyond just a combination of the four disciplines to include the arts and humanities. Modern STEM education imparts not only skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, higher order thinking, design, and inference, but also behavioral competencies such as perseverance, adaptability, cooperation, organization, and responsibility. (p. 1) CONTACT Jr ene Rahm
Les Presses de l'Université de Montréal eBooks, Oct 2, 2018
Routledge eBooks, Jun 14, 2022
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education, Nov 29, 2021
Learning and becoming are understood as emergent from participation in practices at the intersect... more Learning and becoming are understood as emergent from participation in practices at the intersection of formal and informal science education. What learners value, engage in, and transform is understood as entangled with who they have been, think they are, and yet aim to become, calling for an intersectional lens to any analysis of learning and identity in science. Who one is and can become in science, given recognition by others as a science person, is political and a product of intersecting patterns of racism and sexism, to name two key dimensions, which are not additive but instead form a symbiotic relationship. Intersectionality foregrounds the structural, political, and representational of an oppressive system at work and is a lens essential to an equity- and social justice–driven conceptualization of science education at the intersection of formal and informal educational venues. Critical transdisciplinarity facilitates the unpacking of what science is and what kind of science a science person engages in, and it can move studies beyond paralyzing ideologies and meritocracies that undermine full participation in science by youth of color, for instance. Engagement with intersectionality, critical transdisciplinarity, and the political can make rightful presence a shared goal to work toward among science educators and researchers, a much-needed commitment in the informal science education field. Community-based educational spaces (CBES) challenge deficit discourses of youth and, instead, aim to build on youths’ funds of knowledge and identities through empowering practices. Identity work is approached through a grounding in practice theory, which calls for a focus on the figuring of worlds, lives, and identities. Becoming somebody in science is presented as a creative act by youth, who challenge what science is and who can become somebody in science. Actions by youth can make evident desirable identities that result in the “thickening” of their affinities with science, a process also charged by emotions. That is, intersectionality can be experienced as emotionally taxing, while agency and transformation by youth may result in positive emotions. A mobile view of learning and identity in science, captured by the notion of wayfinding, calls to attention hybridity, intersectionality, and critical transdisciplinarity. That grounding can move the study of learning and becoming in science beyond a binary vision of formal and informal science education while also making it political. A deeper commitment and engagement with social justice work in studies of learning and identity in CBES, a process well captured by the notion of rightful presence, could become a common goal to work toward in the vast field of science education, both formal and informal.
Environmental Education Research, May 4, 2018
How can we 'desettle' the colonial discourse and worldview of botanical gardens and its practices... more How can we 'desettle' the colonial discourse and worldview of botanical gardens and its practices in teaching about plants? How can we move towards engaging deeply with who we are and think we are in relation to place, land, and the world, grounded in an intricate sense of harmony? How can we move our work in botanic gardens beyond regarding land, plants, and nature as commodities for causal consumption, or as places to rapidly observe but typically not touch? I explore these three questions in this paper through a weaving together of some of the literature on education and informal learning in botanical gardens and narratives from my research with urban youth of color in the Botanical Garden of Montreal. In doing so, I make evident youths' navigations of botanical gardens and their bids for recognition as other than detached from nature. Together, these narratives help to rethink taken for granted practices of education about plants in gardens grounded in Western views of science and lack of a more serious engagement with holistic perspectives of humans in and with nature.
Contributions from science education research, 2023
Putting Theory into Practice: Tools for Research in Informal Settings , 2012
Putting Theory into Practice offers a toolkit of theoretically-grounded methodologies, methods an... more Putting Theory into Practice offers a toolkit of theoretically-grounded
methodologies, methods and imaginaries showcasing ways of pursuing research of l arning for life in a vast array of settings. The book makes the case for theoretically well-grounded methods that can help us understand learning as it unfolds over time and across space, attesting fully to its messiness and complexity. The chapters that follow offer unique insights into how theory and method constitute one another and how a focus on their interplay strengthens our understanding of the role informal settings play in learning for life. The chapters
also give voice to children, youth, visitors, educators and other professionals who make these settings what they are. We collectively emphasize the rich diversity among learners and educational settings, a product of our modern era of globalization and movement, which can present both challenges and rich opportunities for the current educational infrastructure and our society. As such, that toolkit is not bound to any one particular context of the informal learning infrastructure, nor is it bound to one particular content area of learning or one particular population.